Piaget

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a biologist who originally studied molluscs (publishing twenty scientific papers on them by the time he was 21) but moved into the study of the development of children's understanding, through observing them and talking and listening to them while they worked on exercises he set.

His view of how children's minds work and develop has been enormously influential, particularly in educational theory. His particular insight was the role of maturation (simply growing up) in children's increasing capacity to understand their world: they cannot undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so. His research has spawned a great deal more, much of which has undermined the detail of his own, but like many other original investigators, his importance comes from his overall vision.

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Piaget's Key Ideas

Adaptation	What it says: adapting to the world through assimilation and accommodation
Assimilation	The process by which a person takes material into their mind from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence of their senses to make it fit.
Accommodation	The difference made to one's mind or concepts by the process of assimilation.  Note that assimilation and accommodation go together: you can't have one without the other.
Classification	The ability to group objects together on the basis of common features.
Class Inclusion	The understanding, more advanced than simple classification, that some classes or sets of objects are also sub-sets of a larger class. (E.g. there is a class of objects called dogs. There is also a class called animals. But all dogs are also animals, so the class of animals includes that of dogs)
Conservation	The realisation that objects or sets of objects stay the same even when they are changed about or made to look different.
Decentration	The ability to move away from one system of classification to another one as appropriate.
Egocentrism	The belief that you are the centre of the universe and everything revolves around you: the corresponding inability to see the world as someone else does and adapt to it. Not moral "selfishness", just an early stage of psychological development.
Operation	The process of working something out in your head. Young children (in the sensorimotor and pre-operational stages) have to act, and try things out in the real world, to work things out (like count on fingers): older children and adults can do more in their heads.
Schema (or scheme)	The representation in the mind of a set of perceptions, ideas, and/or actions, which go together.
Stage	A period in a child's development in which he or she is capable of understanding some things but not others

Stage	Characterised by
Sensori-motor  (Birth-2 yrs)	Differentiates self from objects  Recognises self as agent of action and begins to act intentionally: e.g. pulls a string to set mobile in motion or shakes a rattle to make a noise  Achieves object permanence: realises that things continue to exist even when no longer present to the sense (pace Bishop Berkeley)
Pre-operational  (2-7 years)	Learns to use language and to represent objects by images and words  Thinking is still egocentric: has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others  Classifies objects by a single feature: e.g. groups together all the red blocks regardless of shape or all the square blocks regardless of colour
Concrete operational  (7-11 years)	Can think logically about objects and events  Achieves conservation of number (age 6), mass (age 7), and weight (age 9)  Classifies objects according to several features and can order them in series along a single dimension such as size.
Formal operational  (11 years and up)	Can think logically about abstract propositions and test hypotheses systemtically  Becomes concerned with the hypothetical, the future, and ideological problems

The accumulating evidence is that this scheme is too rigid: many children manage concrete operations earlier than he thought, and some people never attain formal operations (or at least are not called upon to use them).

Piaget's approach is central to the school of cognitive theory known as "cognitive constructivism": other scholars, known as "social constructivists", such as Vygotsky and Bruner, have laid more emphasis on the part played by language and other people in enabling children to learn.

See here for Howard Gardner's re-evaluation of Piaget: still a giant, but wrong in practically every detail.

And the combination of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology is beginning to suggest that the overall developmental model is based on dubious premises. (It's too early to give authoritative references for this angle.)

To reference this page copy and paste the text below:

Atherton J S (2013) Learning and Teaching; [On-line: UK] retrieved from

Original material by James Atherton: last up-dated overall 10 February 2013

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

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